The Chip-Chip Gatherers

by Shiva Naipaul

  Nevertheless, the rare visits of Chinese were a refreshing change from the stern realities which dominated the Ramsaran household. He fascinated Wilbert if only because he was the one person he was acquainted with who could be irreverent about his father. Whenever Chinese came, they went on long walks together with Wilbert perched on his shoulders. He chattered constantly. ‘What’s your father doing with all that money he have, eh? (Chinese rounded off nearly every sentence with ‘eh’) … what’s the good of money if you don’t spend it, eh? I would know how to spend it, eh!’ Chinese winked at him and roared with laughter. ‘I bet you’ll know how to spend it, eh! I’ll teach you how. We’ll paint the town red, me and you, eh!’ And all the while he giggled and swayed unsteadily, smelling of rum and tobacco.

  As for Egbert’s remaining brother (on whom a fairly size-able sum had also been settled), he had been no less a disappointment. An inveterate gambler, he had for many years past, after a chequered career in the gambling dens of Port-of-Spain, been living in Venezuela. All contact with him had long since been lost. He was always referred to as Mr Poker. From Egbert’s point of view, he might as well have been dead for he never mentioned him.

  Egbert Ramsaran had clients; not friends. Fortunately for him, as if to make up for the lack of friends, the clients were numerous. He had two days in the week set aside for seeing them: Saturday and Sunday. These clients were divided into two categories: there were those who had genuine business to transact with him; and there were his admirers from the Settlement. He saw the former on Saturday and the latter on Sunday.

  Many of those who came to the house on Saturday mornings were people deeply in debt to him for Egbert Ramsaran was, among other things, a money lender at exorbitant rates of interest. Until Wilbert was old enough, he was not permitted to be present during these interviews. But from the kitchen he could hear what was happening in the sitting-room. The women especially would break down and Egbert Ramsaran was harshest with them. Sometimes they wailed loudly and Rani would put her hands to her ears. ‘Is a terrible, terrible thing to do,’ she murmured. Her son could never understand why it should affect her so.

  Later, when he was deemed to have reached the age of reason, he was summoned into the sitting-room to observe and, if possible, to imbibe the techniques he saw practised there, stationing himself, silent and impassive, behind the magisterial chair. The clients were received en masse. Those dismissed with a rough reprimand considered themselves lucky and beat a hasty, thankful retreat. No doubt with the intention of adding zest to the audience, Egbert Ramsaran occasionally brought with him a darkly varnished box from which, with calculated unconcern, he would extract a pair of dull black revolvers. The squeaking voice pleading its cause would fall to a tremulous whisper and the tremulous whisper die into silence as all those eyes gazed with fixity at the rigorously veined pair of hands fiddling with the catches, toying with the trigger, counting the bullets and taking mocking aim at the heads of the assembled company. Simulating surprise, he would suddenly lift his balding, glistening head, laughing drily at the base of his throat. ‘What happen to your tongues all of a sudden, eh? What stop them wagging? Like you never see a gun before?’ He took aim again, squinting along the barrel. The cowering heads darted crazily, seeking shelter behind one another. He would laugh with greater gaiety. ‘I thought you come here to talk and beg. Eh? Eh? Isn’t that why you come? What you say, Wilbert?’ He glanced at his son. ‘Is to talk and to beg’ (spoken with increased vehemence) ‘they come, not so? That is what God give them tongues for – so they could beg.’ Wilbert’s set expression did not alter. ‘If you don’t start to talk again, I might put all joking aside and really shoot one of you. Like this.’ The trigger clicked emptily. Arms raised in supplication, they fell back towards the door, bodies bundling. Standing there, they watched him. What was most striking was the total absence of hatred on those faces. There was terror. There was dumb incomprehension. But there was no hatred. On the contrary. There was a fatalistic acceptance of the situation in which they found themselves; as if they were confronted by a natural disaster, a mindless Act of God from which there could be no escape and over which they had no control. At length, tiring of his game, Egbert Ramsaran would return the revolvers to their box and, one by one, they would creep cautiously back into the room.

  From about ten o’clock on Sunday mornings the petitioners from the Settlement began to arrive. They were made to wait a long time in the verandah at the front of the house; on occasions as much as two hours. It was a source of tremendous satisfaction to Egbert Ramsaran to listen to the low murmur of their self-effacing conversation and the embarrassed, apologetic shuffling of feet on the red concrete floor. If Wilbert went out to the verandah – and this he liked to do – they would crowd round him, the men and women alike showering him with kisses and cries of unbridled affection. ‘But look at how big and strong he getting,’ they exclaimed. ‘He growing up to be just like his father.’ ‘Yes,’ a second would chime in, ‘he have all he father features. From head to toe. Father and son is as like as two peas.’ They fawned, fondled and massaged him and smothered him with their embraces.

  It was highly gratifying to be fussed over and compared to his father. They behaved as if Rani were no more than the indispensable physical vehicle necessary for bringing him into the world; to be discarded from consideration on fulfilment of contract. It would, they divined, have been insolence to suggest he had any other’s but his father’s features and their adulatory exclamations were pitched at a sufficiently high level to ensure penetration to the ears of Egbert Ramsaran who was locked in his bedroom reading. To enhance his prestige and as a mark of gratitude. Wilbert took them little offerings from the kitchen: overripe mangoes, bananas and oranges. They accepted his offerings with renewed cries of gratitude and affection. ‘You might still only be a boy. But you have a big, big heart all the same. Just like your father.’ One or two of them would make a brave show of eating these fruit. Then, one day, he discovered some of the mangoes and bananas he had given them abandoned unceremoniously in the gutter a few houses away. He was genuinely shocked and hurt. His heart hardened and, inwardly, he accused them of ingratitude. He informed his father of his discovery, urged on by a dimly perceived desire for sympathy and revenge. ‘Why you give them anything for in the first place?’ Egbert Ramsaran asked. ‘It will only help to encourage them in their bad habits. Anyway, that not going to make them love you, you know.’ ‘I not trying to make them love me,’ Wilbert replied, somewhat put out by his reception. Egbert Ramsaran laughed. ‘What you was trying to do then? You got to learn how to handle these people, boy. If you go on like that you going to end up by wasting all my hard-earned money.’ He rested a hand on his son’s shoulder. ‘Listen to me and listen to me good. If they feel you have a soft heart, they will milk you dry. Is not mangoes and oranges they want from you – you yourself see what they do with them and you should let that be a lesson to you in the future. You have to make them learn to respect you. Frighten them a little! Horsewhip them! For once you take away the whip and start being softhearted they going to be crawling all over you like ants over sugar. I know what I talking about. I grow up with them. They all want what you have and it will be up to you and you alone to see that they don’t get it. I won’t always he here. Never feel sorry for the poor because they not going to feel sorry for you. You understand me? Is the way of the world.’ It was a simple and appalling picture of the world he drew for his son – and drew with relish. Till then, the poor had seemed a harmless and immutable species. He had been shown his error and the evidence of those fruit in the gutter was adequate proof. Feeling beleaguered and hemmed in, he cast a more fearful gaze on the clients who crowded the verandah and sitting-room; and their self-effacing shuffle of feet and buzz of conversation became as pregnant with threat as the nervelessness of the bull. Wilbert stopped his weekly donations of rotting fruit. They did not mention the omission; though, needless to say, their cries of affection continued unabat
ed.

  When Egbert Ramsaran decided they had waited a sufficiently long time, he would push his head through the front door and call them into the sitting-room. They filed in, casting anxious glances around them. ‘Sit! Sit!’ he piped ill-humouredly at them. ‘I can’t stand here all day waiting for you.’ They inched nearer the chairs but were still reluctant to do as he bid, as if fearing the floor would suddenly open under their feet and they would be plunged into a bottomless pit. ‘Sit! Sit!’ he screeched at them again, gesticulating angrily and, choosing the unfortunate nearest to him, shoved him forcibly into an armchair. Only when this had happened would the rest take courage and slump into their chairs. Giving the impression of having sunk into some deep and fathomless ocean, they stared, unseeing, around them. All being arranged to his satisfaction, Egbert Ramsaran went with heavy deliberation to the kitchen and brought one of the hard, straight-backed wooden chairs from there. Placing it squarely in the centre of the room and resting his palms flat on his lap, knees drawn tightly together like a shy schoolgirl, he glowered soundlessly at them, his bald head glistening. The audience had begun.

  His moneylending activities, curiously enough, did not extend to this group. Scruple was not involved; or, if it were, only to the most minimal degree. They would have been eager and perfectly content to wallow in indebtedness to him but he had different ideas. If the interviews on Saturday mornings could be roughly described as business, then those on Sundays, with roughly the same accuracy, could be described as pleasure. Indeed, money played a relatively insignificant role in these Sunday morning proceedings. And, to do his visitors justice, they did not come to the house primarily for the money they might get. Admittedly, there were handouts; but they were irregular, unpredictable and tiny. Worse, they were accompanied by an avalanche of insult and abuse.

  Their chief reason for coming was to reassure themselves that this man, who had sprung from the same environment as they had, really did exist; that it was not a dream or an illusion; that after all, no matter how unpromising everything seemed, it was possible to break out of the vicious downward-spinning spiral in which they were trapped; that there was hope for them yet. He was the greatest asset they had. It was easy to sense their desperate devotion by the way they looked at him. Their eyes caressed him, bore into him, dwelling with care on every distortion of his facial muscles, taking due note of every inconsequential movement of the hand and flick of the wrist, every tremor of the legs hidden beneath the well-seamed trousers.

  While these sessions lasted, they did not dare open their mouths except to express enthusiastic agreement with whatever was being said. It did not matter that they were being called slavish, starving, peasant good-for-nothings. ‘You right. You right,’ they chorused, nodding their heads. It was doubtful whether they even heard what he was saying most of the time, so engrossed were they by his sheer physical presence. They engaged in an orgy of self-incrimination and self-denigration. Wilbert studied the performance from a distance.

  The wealth symbolized by the red and black trucks and the gaunt fortress bestriding the Eastern Main Road was an abstraction and there can be no doubt that, in the fulsome warmth of their imaginations, the clients must have exaggerated its proportions to fabulous dimensions. Egbert Ramsaran lived no differently from hundreds of other people who were a great deal poorer than he was. Many of them ate better food – the rigours imposed by Egbert Ramsaran’s delicate digestion were not confined to himself – and kept better houses. This, though, far from decreasing the respect and awe in which he was held, actually served to augment it: the dilapidation of his house added another element of mystery to his person.

  The sole concession he had made to luxury was a refrigerator used chiefly to store what milk was obtained from the cows. Milk was the food best suited to his frail stomach. Even his own bedroom, where he spent most of his leisure time, he had let go to pieces. It was a bare, cheerless room. The walls were dull, sun-bleached pink and were festooned with cracks. There were no pictures. The single item of decoration was a large almanac printed in bold, black type giving the phases of the moon and a smattering of information directed to horticulturists. It was attached to a bit of brown string suspended from a nail which had been carelessly hammered into the wall. The nail was crooked and the almanac habitually awry. Thin strips of yellowing lace curtain fell drooping across the windows. The ceiling bulged in places and was stained with circular patches where the rain had leaked through.

  He resisted every suggestion of renovation. ‘I don’t want to live in Buckingham Palace,’ he used to say. ‘I prefer to leave all that kind of fancy living to people like Vishnu Bholai. A roof over my head is all I need.’ Yet, he was not a miser in the commonly accepted sense of the term. His wealth enabled him to indulge to the full a capricious streak in his nature: his despotism was not limited to the clients. Once, he had descended out of the blue on the local elementary school and offered to build them a lavatory. As it turned out (and as he probably knew) the school was already well provided for in that direction. The headmaster, risking his wrath, came to the house to see him and tried to persuade him to donate some books instead. Egbert Ramsaran was firm. ‘I not donating no books to nobody,’ he declared flatly. ‘If it was books I wanted to give, it was books I would have give.’ The headmaster pleaded. ‘Come to the school and see for yourself, Mr Ramsaran. Half of the children don’t have the books they need. Is not lavatories we need.’ Egbert Ramsaran was not to be moved. ‘Is a lavatory or nothing, Headmaster. Take your pick.’ Rather than see the money disappear altogether, the school graciously accepted the lavatory. Needless to say, the lavatories in his own house were in a state of utter disrepair.

  Somewhere along the line a vital spark had been extinguished in Egbert Ramsaran. He had performed his filial duties punctiliously but it was a punctiliousness devoid of genuine feeling. At bottom, he was tied to nothing. For instance, it caused him not a moment’s real pain that Chinese lived in direst poverty: to him it was no more than a convenient parable; a counterpoint to his own achievement. Neither did he mourn the loss, amounting to death, of Poker. His parents might never have existed. He had expunged such foolish, unprofitable sentiment from his life. Sentiment got in the way of the particular brand of clarity he had come to value so highly. ‘You must try and learn to see things clearly,’ he tirelessly advised his son. ‘Never listen to excuses. If a man let you down once, finish with him. Kick him through the door! If you don’t do that, people will think you have water in your veins. Depend only on yourself. Think clearly! And always call a spade a spade. Remember that!’ His cold-bloodedness was as tangible a trait as his well-developed muscles. He had the unshakeable conviction that he had mastered the ways of the world; a conviction bordering on fanaticism. Possessed by a completely amoral and neutral sense of righteousness, he tyrannized both others and himself. He pictured himself as an isolated individual pitted in a struggle to the death against other isolated individuals. All men were equally strangers to him.

  It was this more than anything else which marked him off from his contemporaries. They, honestly or dishonestly, and with varying degrees of ruthlessness, were busy laying the foundations of empires expected to live on in their children and grandchildren. Egbert Ramsaran was animated by no idea larger than himself. He was incapable of the self-sacrifice it demanded. If he could have taken his money with him into the grave, he might have done so. He regarded it as an entity as inseparable from himself as were his arms and legs and it required an effort of concentration for him to appreciate that one day he would die and his wealth would pass to Wilbert who would be able to do with it as he pleased. A species of panic used to seize him whenever he recalled this. Therefore he did his best to see that Wilbert, from the tenderest age, received the distillation of a distorted life’s experience.

  He used his money to torment and humiliate. Beyond that it was of no intrinsic value to him. Success had effectively slaughtered his sensibilities. Years of struggle when, escaping from
a fate that filled him with terror, he had cast all scruple aside and driven himself to the brink of nervous collapse, had gradually obscured the original purpose of that struggle. Years during which, for the sake of self-preservation, he had had to regard other men as things to be manipulated or jettisoned had, ultimately, clouded his vision and crippled his freedom of action. He was swept along by the momentum generated by an original act of will, as much its victim as those who had been crushed by it. Always within reach, forcing their attentions upon him like ghosts which refused to be laid, were the living representatives of the fate he had so narrowly avoided. He grew to depend on them much as he might have done on a pernicious drug, since he too had constantly to convince himself that his escape was neither dream nor illusion. Those closest to him were the worst affected and the first person on whom he was to unleash his true capacity for destruction was his wife.

  2

  Whenever Wilbert thought of his mother, he thought of her fingers: long and slender, though marred by swollen joints; the skin taut and yellow; the fingernails like little pink shells such as one finds by the seaside. She had married Egbert Ramsaran when she was thirty. In marrying her, he had broken his vow of never returning to the Settlement: it was there, when he felt the time was ripe, he had gone to find his bride. By the standards of her family, Rani was already an old maid and they had long given up all hope for her. Precedent dictated that she be banished to the kitchen and the back of the house – or rather, hut.